COLORADO SPRINGS — A boy with wild blond hair and dark-rimmed glasses flings a basketball toward the net high above his head. He is 10, and wearing the same green scrubs and state-issue white gym shoes as the teenage girls doing squats nearby during post-lunch recreation hour.

The group lives in the “bobcat” pod at Spring Creek Youth Services Center, one of 10 state-run youth corrections facilities for kids accused of crimes from truancy to murder.

Their bedrooms are brick cells with a tiny slice of window, barren aside from a cot with neatly folded sheets and towels set at the foot. The 10 residents of each pod — with their own wildlife painted on the wall in the common area — stick together all day, at school, at rec time and in the cafeteria for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The rooms on the pod’s second floor have been vacant since the center dropped its capacity from 80 youths to 51, so the upstairs walkway holds potted plants whose vines cling to the railings.

Keeping pod-mates together all day, capping capacity at 51 and improving the staff-to-youth ratio to 1-to-5 instead of 1-to-10 has resulted in a dramatic decrease in violence. Since the reforms six months ago, assaults and fights have dropped by 70 percent and use of seclusion has dropped almost 60 percent.

Before the reforms, there were about 20 fights and assaults per month, and now that number hovers between four and seven.

“I personally go home feeling fulfilled. I used to go home feeling like I wanted to get in the hot tub and forget this day ever existed,” said Louis Alejandro, Spring Creek’s security supervisor. “When you are taking care of their needs, there is no reason for them to rebel against us.”

Two years ago, Spring Creek was embattled, tarnished by the arrest of a corrections officer on charges of second-degree assault and child abuse, and blasted by former staff members who spoke out about violence and riots. Now the center, which houses youths awaiting sentencing, is held up by state youth corrections officials as an example of how investment in staff can shift course.

Division director Anders Jacobson is asking for 65 additional staff members this year to expand the Spring Creek model for other youth corrections centers across the state. At the same time, lawmakers are considering legislation backed by the Colorado Child Safety Coalition that would allow an outside consultant to begin a therapeutic youth services program, one without seclusion, pain compliance techniques or physical restraints.

The Coalition recently released a scathing investigation, based on documents and interviews with youths, counting 3,611 times that youths were restrained, including by handcuffs, shackles or a straitjacket called “the wrap” in a 13-month period. The wrap, in which a youth is bound and then wrapped, was used 253 times.

Before the report, the division already had planned to phase out use of pain compliance, pressure point techniques and “offensive strikes” by Aug. 1, Jacobson said. Officials also plan to change staff job titles from “correctional officer” to “youth services specialist” and create more “home-like environments,” perhaps by loosening rules about clothing or belongings. And they set a goal to improve the youth-to-staff ratio and assign the same staff to the same pod each day, similar to Spring Creek, Jacobson said.

The Division of Youth Corrections has asked lawmakers three years in a row for more staff, saying that the division would need an additional 280 people to improve the staff-to-youth ratio to 1-to-8 during waking hours and 1-to-16 at night, which is the federal requirement. In the last two years, state lawmakers have approved the hiring of 143 staff members.

Since then, some youth services centers have moved closer to one staff member per eight youths, including Adams and Pueblo centers, but others, including Lookout Mountain in Golden and Mount View in Lakewood, are still at 1-to-11.

Critics of Colorado’s youth corrections system are pushing for an intervention from Missouri Youth Services Institute, a nonprofit started by Mark Steward, director of Missouri’s youth corrections system for 17 years.

In Missouri, there is one staff member for every five or six youths, and no more than 12 youths are grouped together. The groups are cohesive, spending all day with each other and the same staff members instead of breaking off for separate drug counseling or sex-offender therapy. After dinner, back in their “dorm,” the group talks about the day, any behavioral issues that arose during school or meals. Often, they find common ground talking about what got them into the system — abuse, neglect, gangs, family violence, drugs and alcohol.

Unlike Colorado, cells, or “bedrooms,” are not locked, and youths are allowed to bring their own belongings.

In Missouri, youths are 4.5 times less likely and staff members are 13 times less likely to be assaulted than the national average. The state does not use isolation or the “wrap.” Handcuffs are used only on “rare occasions.” When restraint is required to protect a youth or staff member, other youths assist. The system has a 7 percent recidivism rate, meaning 93 percent of youths in the system do not return, compared with 60 percent in some states.

“It gets beyond behavioral compliance into making internalized changes,” Steward said. “It changes the way they see things, the way they think things out, how it impacts their family, their school, their everything.”

Steward retired as system director to start the nonprofit in 2005 after Louisiana asked for help in reforming its youth corrections system, which was plagued with violence and under federal review after a guard struck a youth who fell, hit their head and died. The institute has since helped about a dozen states.

Steward recently visited Colorado, touring the Lookout Mountain center. “I’ve seen a lot of bad systems — this system has a lot to build on,” he said. “I was impressed by the staff interaction with students.”

Colorado director Jacobson says the key to the Missouri model is limiting groups of youths to 10 and having one staff member per five youths, something Colorado can accomplish with more staff.

“Our philosophy is sound,” he said. “There is not a system that can’t improve, including Missouri.”

At Spring Creek, youths are grouped in living units based on age, not crime, though one unit is for girls of all ages because the center typically has few girls. Boys are grouped ages 10-13, 14-15 and 16-17.

“Out of 10, you might have one with a high-profile case and we can watch that,” Alejandro said. “If you treat them like kids, they act like kids. They are out there in the streets acting the way they are because they aren’t being treated like kids.”

Photos in the common areas of the living units show youths how to place their hands behind their backs to walk in line, fold their linens at the end of their beds, and line up their utensils on their cafeteria trays. In the cafeteria, where a recent day’s choices included sloppy Joes and broccoli cheese soup, walls divide eating areas so that pod-mates eat together and not with other pods.

Signs in the center’s hallways remind youths to say “please and thank you,” and security officers are positioned in classes run by Harrison School District. In another area, a row of teens in green scrubs is lined up in front of a woman who explains they are about to hear the charges against them via television screens during an initial court hearing.

Spring Creek takes youths immediately after their arrest and as they await conviction and sentencing. Their average stay is about 15 days, and if they are sentenced to additional time by a court, they are sent to another youth center.

Rooms that once were used for seclusion have been converted to staff offices and storage closets because of divisionwide reforms. The system has dropped its average seclusion time to 48 minutes, compared with the national average of about 17 hours, Jacobson said.

Still, some windowless cells for isolation exist. “We’re still going to have difficult issues. They are coming right off the street,” Jacobson said.

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